What’s Obama’s Plan C for Immigration?

What a bad week it was for President Obama’s immigration policies, and for millions living in limbo in the United States.

A federal appeals panel swatted down Mr. Obama’s latest executive actions to limit deportations — key elements of his strategy to mend a broken immigration system through administrative fixes after a Republican House strangled full-scale legislative reform. It was the second time Republican-appointed judges, with partisan efficiency, picked apart what the administration said was a rock-solid legal argument for using its discretion to protect more than four million people from being deported.

This is the month that these millions were supposed to begin lining up to tell the authorities: Here we are, sign us up. But because 26 states sued to block Mr. Obama’s plans, the immigrants, instead of receiving permission to legally stay and work, are left holding nothing but unmet promises, their lives as anxious and uncertain as ever.

So what is Plan C?

The administration faces a tangle of options. It says it still expects to win its case, probably not with the district judge, whose decision included many pages of railing against Obama “lawlessness,” but maybe in the Republican-dominated Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, or in the Supreme Court. This litigation’s journey will last well into next year, possibly beyond. What lies over that horizon, who knows.

While it waits and frets, the administration still has an obligation not to quit. Mr. Obama should follow through on his oft-stated commitment to do all he can to make the immigration system more humane.

This means making sure that his original 2012 program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which shields immigrants brought here illegally as children, works as planned. It has not been blocked by any court, and many young people — perhaps 90,000 a year — are still free to make use of it as they reach the age of eligibility. The administration’s revised enforcement priorities — in line with Mr. Obama’s promise to focus on deporting serious criminals, not workers and parents who pose no threat — still need to be honored.

Simultaneously, Mr. Obama and the Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, need to keep throttling back their turbocharged deportation effort, which at times has exceeded 400,000 a year. The administration deported about 360,000 people in fiscal 2014, and the total looks to be lower this year. But there is still much further to go, and there are still too many worries in immigrant communities that minor scrapes with the law will continue tearing families apart. A new Obama enforcement effort — the Priority Enforcement Program, or PEP — promises to keep the focus on dangerous immigration violators, but it still maintains a troubling link between federal authorities and local law-enforcement agencies, whose cops and deputies should not be part of any deportation dragnet.

The administration also needs to rein in rogue agents who haven’t gotten the message that they cannot continue to seize everybody they find. In an interview late last year, Mr. Obama, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement workers, said, “We have to go and train ICE workers, so that they are responding in a different way.”

Let’s make sure that happens. Let’s also see that the administration reforms its rotted immigration detention system, which abuses and needlessly traumatizes thousands. At the very least, it should close the lockups where mothers and young children are held for weeks and months, awaiting court dates. Advocates have raised profound concerns about the effects of prolonged detention on vulnerable children, many of whom faced brutality and death in Central America. Those who fled here for their lives must not languish behind bars. Innocent children do not ever belong in prison.